Rodney Pinder is director of the International News Safety Institute and a former Global Editor for Reuters Television. He wrote an article recently about the hostile conditions in which many journalists work around the world and how even in death, whether by sniper fire or cold blooded murder, they are usually denied justice.

Pinder quoted the Committee to Protect Journalists as saying in its statistics released on World Press Freedom Day in 2003 that in 94 per cent of cases over the preceding 10 years those who murdered journalists did so with impunity. Elsewhere he reveals that more than 1,200 journalists and support staff have been killed in the line of duty in the past 10 years.

The Director-General of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura made “impunity” the centrepiece of his organisation’s celebration of World Press Freedom Day in 2003. “I appeal to all governments, at all levels, to fulfil their responsibility to ensure that crimes against journalists do not go unpunished,” he declared. “It is essential that all violations are investigated thoroughly, that all perpetrators are prosecuted, and that all judicial systems and processes are capable of punishing those found guilty.”

Pinder’s article in the World Association of Newspapers coincided with World Press Freedom Day observed on May 3 this year. It was the day when Pakistani journalists were badly beaten up in Islamabad and Lahore because they were taking out processions to mark an important day in their calendar. India was perhaps a shade worse since no one seemed to know here about the press freedom day. It came as quietly as it went away, without a murmur from anyone, much less from the newspapers that never seem to tire of gloating about press freedoms they say abound in the country.

These claims of course are an exaggeration. If press freedoms do exist they are more in the manner of trundling along rather than having a robust presence. Were it any other way, there would be no need to worry about the unfortunate things that happened with Iftikhar Geelani and Kumar Badal. If press freedoms were truly a sacred covenant in the country as it should be, courageous journalists like Nikhil Waghle would not be a routine target of Mumbai’s fascist Shiv Sena and the likes.

Incarceration and murder of journalists abound in Nepal and Bangladesh perennially and in Sri Lanka too, off and on. In countries like India where the appetite for newspapers is nearly limitless, the adverse conditions in which journalists work is even more palpable in the vernacular press, where the reporter has to wade through the minefield of an extremely hostile turf that combines a mix of feudal satraps with the underworld.

For example, Rodney Pinder may never have heard of Shitla Prasad Singh who is editor and publisher of Jan Morcha, a bold newspaper in Hindi brought out from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, a stone’s throw away from Ayodhya. Can you imagine a solitary newspaper with virtually no major support system to ensure its physical security much less economic sustenance, taking on the Hindutva hordes that swarm the region with impunity, where they razed the Babri Masjid with state patronage 13 years ago?

That Shitla Singh is still alive after the numerous physical assaults on him and his newspaper should count as a miracle. A memorable example of his well-investigated reports came on February 26, 2002, when he carried the accounts of harassed and beaten passengers of the Sabarmati Express, mostly Muslims by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

All this happened near Faizabad on February 25, when a Hindutva platoon was returning from Ayodhya, peeved by a surprise election defeat in Uttar Pradesh. It was the same train that met with the tragic deaths in Godhra two days later. Shitla’s report gives us interesting clues about the kind of people who were travelling on the ill-fated train and about what might have gone wrong.

And yet, a few months after the tragedy Shitla told a meeting, attended among others by the state’s senior politicians that the biggest threat to his kind of journalism came not from the menacingly violent atmosphere in which he worked, but from “the pressure of commercial houses” that impede “impartial and fearless journalism.”

Now here is a point to ponder. Is the new corporate culture in which most journalists work today conducive to their own welfare? To quote an example closer home, I remember, during Rodney Pinder’s tenure as Reuters New Editor based in Hong Kong, that a congratulatory message was dispatched by the editors to the stringer in Kigali about an interesting market moving story the reporter had done in Rwanda.

Here was a journalist, a brave African journalist if I remember right, who had risked his life and limb to be in Rwanda at the height of the Hutu-Tutsi massacres to report on the horrors of human butchery that had gone on for months without end. But the editors strangely chose only one story for praise. That story pertained to the negative impact the massacres would have on the country’s next coffee crop! It was a telling example of the times we are living in, not just the journalists but all of us.

With the market-moving story and the vagaries of the Sensex and Hang Seng Index driving their destiny, and when issues like hunger, poverty alleviation, gender inequality, caste wars and communalism are increasingly relegated to the margins of the main business of journalism, are we, the journalists helping create a more compassionate, caring world which also cares for its journalists? The answer is all too well known. Perhaps Rodney Pinder already has it on his curriculum at the International News Safety Institute.